


Countdown

by GalaxyOwl



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-20
Updated: 2016-01-20
Packaged: 2018-05-15 03:47:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5770060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GalaxyOwl/pseuds/GalaxyOwl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seven, six, five, four...</p><p>(Lovelace reflects on the people she's lost.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Countdown

2.

“Rhea?” Lovelace called again. There was no response. There hadn’t been for hours.

She didn’t know what had happened. What could possibly have caused Rhea to just disappear like that. (What could possibly have caused Fourier to just disappear like that?) 

“Don’t bother,” Selberg said, but it was easier said than done.

The worst part was that it had taken her so long to notice. She’d thought that maybe Rhea was feeling sulky, or tired, or whatever it was AIs felt instead of sulky, or tired. It would certainly have been within her right.

But she wasn’t. Rhea was gone.

They’d been planning on leaving today. Everything had been ready to go, even with all their… setbacks. But now without Rhea, they’d need to check over the ship manually if they wanted to have a chance of making it out of there alive. And, frankly, they don’t have the kind of time it would take do that right. The Hephaestus felt less safe every day they stayed there, and she just didn’t know…

She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t loose someone else, and she certainly couldn’t just shrug it off like nothing. She’d thought Rhea, surely, Rhea was safe. Rhea couldn’t be hurt. But she could be shut down. She was a machine, after all. (She was a crew member. A friend.)

And Lovelace didn’t want to think about the implications in the verb _shut down_. Did someone _shut_ her down? 

She was being paranoid. She had to trust Selberg. Had to trust her own crew, because they were—he was—all that she had left. If they couldn’t trust each other, then they were as good as dead.

She could hear the station groaning. Could practically feel the air around her growing thinner as life support threatened to fail again, and again, and again.

It was more than likely they were as good as dead either way.

***

3.

Fourier was gone. Dead or vanished, it didn’t matter. 

Gone.

There was only her and Selberg left—and Rhea. Always Rhea. But the ship felt so much emptier without Fourier there. Lovelace missed her, strange as it sounded. It sometimes had seemed like she was the only one with any shred of optimism left. (Look how far that got her.)

Lovelace sighed, looked over the ship they’d been assembling one last time. All of the pieces were there. The wires sparked under her fingertips as she twisted them this way and that, trying to get this Frankenstein of a machine to finally _work_. 

“Rhea,” she said aloud. Rhea’s response floated down from the speakers. “How close do you think we are to getting this thing working? Time estimate?”

She answered, but it didn’t really matter. They had an engine now, but was it enough? It had to be.

Fourier was dead. (Not dead. Gone.)

Dead would almost have been easier. Lovelace has dealt with dead before, far more than she would like. At least then you knew who to blame: age, weather, disease. The cruel hand of fate, whatever you wanted to call it. You might not like it, but at least you can understand.

She didn’t understand this. She didn’t understand where her poor, brilliant scientist could have disappeared to.

***

4.

“Fourier?” Lovelace rapped lightly on the door to Fourier’s personal quarters. She was dreading the moment it opened. The moment when she’d have to be the one to tell her that Hui was, finally, dead.

The moment came, and Fourier was standing there, and she could tell she already knew.

“Is he—?” Lovelace just nodded.

Fourier seemed to crumple in on herself, her eyes averting Lovelace’s gaze. Lovelace didn’t know what to say. They’d all known it was coming, but somehow that made it that much worse to realize it was finally here.

“It’s okay,” Lovelace said, but she knew it wasn’t. She was still standing in the hallway outside of Fourier’s room, unsure whether she should ask to come in or just leave. She wasn’t entirely sure she had the energy for either. Getting to sleep the night before had been difficult. For all of them, as far as she could tell.

“It’s just…” Fourier trails off. “As long as he was still alive, I could hold out hope. But now, I just—I don’t know.” 

Lovelace felt the weight of it all sitting in her chest, heavy as a stone. There wasn’t anything she could say that could make this right. There wasn’t, she realized, anything to stop this from happening again. The disease was inhuman. Deadly. Terrifying.

Repetitive. 

She’d seen this all before. This was how it played out with Lambert and how it could easily play out with any of their number next. Like a broken record, playing the same snatch of song over and over.

“The letters,” Fourier said suddenly. “I should show you.” She patted her pockets, fumbled, pulled out a few sheets of paper. “He gave me these, for when… They’re for his family.”

Lovelace nodded. 

“Can you promise me?” Fourier said, standing there at the doorway. “Can you promise me we’ll get them to his family?”

Lovelace realized that there was no real reason she should promise this. They very well might never make it home. And Fourier knew this; she just wasn’t thinking clearly with everything that had happened today. But, Lovelace realized, it had been Hui’s dying wish (and for all she knew, it may yet be Fourier’s). 

“I promise,” she said. 

***

5.

Selberg grimaced. "Officer Lambert is dead," he told her.

Lovelace stopped. She'd been pacing in the hall outside the medical office. At least, the closest she could get to pacing in the microgravity of the Hephaestus, swinging herself back and forth though the hallway. 

"You said you had it under control," she said. "That it wasn't deadly." It wasn't his fault, of course, any of it. He hadn't known. But she couldn't help feeling frustrated.

"Condition had been worsening since I told you that," Selberg replied evenly. "You knew that."

Lovelace just nodded. She didn't know what else to say. Sam was dead, and that wasn’t supposed to happen. But sometimes things happened even when they weren't supposed to.

Was there anything she could have done? Could they have caught the outbreak sooner? Prevented it somehow? Or was Lambert always going to die up here, so far away from… well, from anything? She felt so useless just sitting there, watching people around her die.

She wouldn’t have thought she’d care that much. But he’d been one of hers, as much as Fisher had been. And that alone would have made this hard.

Selberg said something else—a question?—but she wasn't really listening just now. She was still just trying to process what it all meant: that Lambert was dead. That she would never see him again.

***

6.

They had a funeral for Fisher. Or maybe not quite a funeral, not with the body was God-knows-where, obliterated by the meteor storm or else floating somewhere in the void, and with no real physical vestiges of ceremony. But they did it anyways, gathered in the hall and just… talked.

It was Fourier’s idea, suggested quietly to Lovelace several days after the event. In that big, empty room, it almost felt like some mandated employee bonding tradition, except that—

Except that Fisher wasn’t there.

Lovelace suddenly felt as if she hadn’t known him very well at all. For a year, she’d lived with him, seen him every day at meals and meetings and chance encounters in the hallways. But she hadn’t really known him. She didn’t know anything about his life on Earth. She didn’t know much about his interests, his favorite movie or whether he was a cat or a dog person or whether he ever thought he’d die alone in space.

Maybe it was irrational; it wasn’t as if she knew any of the others all that well. But it suddenly seemed like a failing on her part, to not have made some effort. He’d been her crew member, her engineer. He’d been something.

She said none of this out loud as Selberg muttered his way through something that might have resembled a eulogy. She regretted agreeing to this gathering. Maybe it would do some good for the others, though. That might make it worth it.

 _What will his family think_ , she wondered, _two weeks from now?_

***

7.

It was time, Lovelace thought, for her to properly meet the last member of her crew. The others had all spread out to their respective work stations (or, more likely, their sleeping quarters), and Lovelace found herself alone on the bridge. 

Or, not quite alone. That was the whole point of this admittedly-unsteady train of thought. 

“Rhea?” She felt more than a little silly to be addressing empty air.

But the operating system beeped out an answer. It took Lovelace a moment to fully understand what it had said. What _she_ had said, she corrected herself. If what she’d been told was to be believed, the thing was fully sentient. And she wasn’t about to start this conversation by dehumanizing the person she was talking to. (Was it still called dehumanizing when the person in question wasn’t human?)

“I just wanted to say hello,” she explained, “make sure everything’s ship-shape or whatever.” Rhea assured her that it was. 

Lovelace spent a few more moments making small talk. She wondered if Rhea actually cared for the conversation, or if she was just appeasing her. It felt incredibly awkward.

Rhea started to say something else—about the star, she thought—but was cut off mid-statement by a voice from the still-open doorway. “Um, am I interrupting anything?”

Lovelace turned to see who it was, recognized one of the scientists—the woman. “No, nothing important, Dr.—“ She grasped for the name. “Fourier.” 

“Great,” Fourier said. “There was something I wanted to ask you.”

Lovelace nodded. She still didn’t really know any of the crew, so she was uncertain what it was Fourier could possibly be bringing to her. But she figured it couldn’t hurt to do what she could. “What is it?”

***

1.

It’s just her, now.

Isabel Lovelace, alone on this ship her crew built together. She has a box of personal belongings packed and sitting to her. Hui’s letters are in there. On the other side of the space, the cryochamber sits, waiting. She stares out the window, takes one last look at the Hephaestus, prays for the billionth time that she’s right about Selberg. That she didn’t just leave an innocent man to die alone.

She’s the last one left, either way.


End file.
